I renamed some of my files the character name #1 or whatever, in order to have one save file for character A and another for character B. so I could play more than one. This used to work, when I'd save it I'd save over the file named Grania1 for instance and not over the one named Razhir1. Tonight it ate all of those uniquely named save games with the character I was playing today in spite of the fact that I only ever told it to overwrite Grania1. Before tonight it was working like it should and keeping them all separate. How can this happen? The system should not be writing over old saves that I have specially renamed should it? How can I stop it from doing that if so?

I am so miffed to loose 4 unique characters, some level 20 or so each!

PS. I tried renaming the Razhir.ess.bak to just .ess and loading it, It loads with all my stuff but no character I am a creepy empty suit walking around. Is there any way to get him back from the .bak file? Those seem not to have been overwritten.

I seem to be talking to myself here but anyway, turns out the empty robe is a bug (archmage robe plus mask equals invisible head) and I fixed it with info found elsewhere. So I got my characters back renaming the .ess.bak files if it comes up for anybody else. I am just disabling all autosave features and making a back up elsewhere too, for future saves. I wish this would work like it used to though where the system never overwrote a file once you had given it a unique name (unless you told it to).

The moral of the story is: Don't mess with your save files.

I have no such issue, while making named saves through the console.

It did the same with some of my brothers on the PS3. Not sure why.

The problem was not messing with the save files, just so you know. I played for a week or two with the renamed saves and it worked great, like it used to with the game not overwriting them. Yesterday the game overwrote them all and I have no idea why. Not because of anything I did. I lost 4 characters and managed to save one from the .bak file.